Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing more web traffic is post web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin posting new content regularly on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming increasingly more competitive and businesses are exploring any advantage they believe will help them get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. An expertly configured website gives your business a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only is additional work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with a story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is moving along in the widget-making manufacturing plant when suddenly, things cease working.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert goes immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the circuit board for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer and makes a single tap about 3 inches from the bottom-right corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything springs to life again.
The manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Bewildered to the point of feeling outrage, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website or blog fully configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
While the solution to many problems may seem quite easy once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve certain results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to ensure that things function as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your web site, and a number of third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we create a simplified diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites and services.
External Accounts
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content gets posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it then gets automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external platforms to your traffic network, content pointing back to your website will be automatically syndicated to these platforms. Your content and website will be given additional exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings to speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important data, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, you can use the information with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, you can add traffic tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to many other applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account has been with Bing are set up, use this information to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up in order to integrate these with your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up accounts with and post your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will review some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications that can be added to your own traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services box
By default, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress will do the rest …
(WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to ping the list of update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks enable your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways your permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot ignore the importance of website security.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Most social share plugins allow you to select which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Features In Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Sections
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website complies with all legal requirements.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress website here:
WordPress Post Categories & Tags
WordPress tags & categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.
(Categories help search engines index your web pages, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Stages.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your website content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Only search engines can interpret XML sitemaps. Although Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Another Source Of Web Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong URL into their web browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are presented with an error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 page can be configured to funnel visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to attract new web traffic is add new content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process can take some website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-driven website and proven online marketing methods.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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